Arch Enemies

At Wellesley, you could tell how stressed out I was by the thickness of my eyebrows. It wasn't that I neglected my grooming as my workload increased; on the contrary, plucking was a stress reliever. Tackling a paper on how Vaclav Havel's politics were foreshadowed in his plays seemed to go much more smoothly after a good session in front of the mirror with the Tweezerman.

My eyebrows disappeared completely just days after my surgery, only to sprout back again, seemingly overnight. I spent the last two weeks recovering in the country with nobody but Michael, Mom and the wild turkeys in the yard to see the regrowth process. Toward the end of last week, preparing to return to the city and to head back to work this week, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and wondered what those caterpillars were doing onto my forehead, which was the catalyst for me to go see somebody about this - although they are not back to their old length, they are coming in at full force thickness.

As a possessor of brows that are more Frida Kahlo than Marlene Dietrich, waxing, tweezing and threading have long been part of my grooming routine. Depending on how much time I have, my level of hirsute urgency and my budget, for the past 8 years I have visited various hair removal sites in the city - Shobha, Bliss, and the $10 quick threading place across the street from my apartment - for my brow maintenance. So I am used to working with different people, but this time, when the woman at the local day spa in Litchfield asked me what I wanted, I did not know what to say. I'd done this a thousand times, but never before with brows that were only just starting to grow back in. What if she is too rough and takes too much? What if the stubble is still too short for her to get a purchase on it? In the end, I opted for a "clean up, but not too thin."

Better, but in the bright bathroom lights back at home I realized they were still on the thick side. As I stood before the mirror, carefully plucking one hair at a time, checking for symmetry every few minutes, I found a familiar but different kind of comfort in the sharp pull of the tweezers. Like mascara wearing, shampoo buying, and bra fitting, eyebrow tweezing is yet one more mundane activity that brings me closer to normal, and I welcome it.